How Grice Invented Science

Speranza

Excerpts from a the NYT review of "The Lagoon: How Aristotle Invented Science"

"Leroi is a scientist, and Aristotle is his hero."

"This conjunction is interesting because, in the official telling of modern science’s origins, Aristotle is hardly regarded as heroic."

"Instead he’s portrayed as the obstacle over which the early heroes of the scientific revolution — Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo — had to leap in order to impose a genuinely explanatory methodology over the often deceptive input of sense perception."

"After all, what could be clearer to the senses than that the Earth is stationary and the heavens revolve around it?"

"If there was any ancient whom these pioneers of modern science esteemed it was PLATO."

"PLATO, too, had emphasized the deceptiveness of appearances."

 "What’s more he had suggested, however obliquely, most especially in his “Timaeus,” that mathematics reveals the true structure of the cosmos, offering us the means by which we can distinguish between reliable and unreliable appearances."

 

"So, at least, did men like Galileo read the “Timaeus,” finding insights there to topple the formidable edifice of a Church-fortified Aristotelianism."

 

"The new scientists discarded at least two of the four Aristotelian causes, the formal and the final, the latter having injected a pernicious teleology into all physical explanations."

 

"Flames leap and rocks fall because their constituent elements are striving to get to their right places."

 

"In place of Aristotle’s qualitative categories, the new scientists put quantitative descriptions of matter in motion."

 

"What Aristotle had sundered, the celestial and the terrestrial, were united under one mechanics."

 

"And the rest, as they say, is history."

"But this is the history of science as told from the vantage point of physics and cosmology."

 

"Leroi is a BIOLOGIST, and he tells the story of science differently."

 

"He cannot mention Plato without hissing, often characterizing him as anti-scientific or, at the very best, a poor scientist."

 

Leroi writes:

 

“Plato’s science is barely distinguishable from theology.”

 

"Instead Leroi’s heart belongs to Aristotle, who not only was, like him, an enthusiastic student of biology, particularly of zoology, but who also, unlike Plato, was besotted by the world of appearances."

 

"Aristotle exemplifies one kind of scientific aptitude."

 

"He was an enthralled observer of the natural world, bedazzled by data, seeking causal explanations not in abstract numbers but in concrete details acquired through avid sense perception."

"The lagoon of Leroi’s title is on the Aegean island of Lesbos."

 

"Assos, on the coast of what is now Turkey, faced Lesbos, and it was in Assos that Aristotle lived between his two Athenian residencies, the first as a student and then teacher at Plato’s Academy, the second as head of his own school, the Lyceum."

 

"Leroi accepts the conclusion of the biologist D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, who, in 1910, published a translation of Aristotle’s “Historia Animalium,” that it was primarily beside the life-teeming lagoon of Lesbos where Aristotle slaked his thirst for biological observations."

 

"This is why so many of the animals of Aristotle’s prose live in or near the sea."

 

"Given Leroi’s own impassioned empiricism, he must see it all with his own eyes, and so this book, partly a travelogue, treats us to vivid descriptions of fauna and flora, a lyricism arising from the density of the details and the delight taken in them."

 

"Leroi says that Aristotle’s writing is a “naturalist’s joy”"

 

"Plato and Aristotle: What an accident of history that two such contrasting orientations toward the physical world, animated by two such different aesthetic sensibilities, should have been pedagogically entangled with each other."

 

"One espies beauty in the elegance of the mathematical proportions he is certain rules the cosmos, the other in the richness of sensed particularities he is certain can be functionally explained."

 

"Both orientations would find application in the developed sciences to come, though neither Plato nor Aristotle was a “finished” scientist."

 

"Something methodologically original occurred during the observing, theorizing, experimenting activity of the scientific revolution."

 

"Neither Plato nor Aristotle had mastered the concept of experiment."

 

"To read some semblance of our science into these ancients requires charitably imaginative interpretations that clarify their obscurities with insights toward which they were themselves, perhaps, groping."

 

"Some of us are prepared to extend such interpretations toward Plato."

 

"Leroi extends them toward Aris­totle, so much so that he would vehemently reject my statement that Aristotle, like Plato, was not the finished scientific article."

 

“As I contemplate the elaborate tapestry of his science, and compare it to ours, I conclude that we can now see his intentions and accomplishment more clearly than any previous age has seen them and that, if this is so, it is because we have caught up with him.”

"This seems an extravagant claim, and, to justify it, Leroi energetically exhumes those moldering Aristotelian categories that the scientific revolution had supposedly buried and breathes the advances of modern biology into them."

 

"He performs the resuscitation with dexterity, though he’s not the first."

 

"The great evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr, for example, urged, in his “Toward a New Philosophy of ­Biology: Observations of an Evolutionist,” that it is “quite legitimate to employ modern terms like ‘genetic program’ for ‘eidos’ where this helps to elucidate Aristotle’s thoughts.”

 

"Mayr acknowledged, however, that Aristotle’s notion of fixed species is inconsistent with biology’s most important advance, the theory of evolution."

"Leroi follows closely in the footsteps of such generous elucidators."

 

"The modern understanding of genetically encoded information is applied not only to Aristotle’s formal cause, his “eidos,” and to his notion that all change is potentiality actualized, but also to his notion of the soul."

 

"“Aristotle’s belief that we should attend less to the matter than to the informational structure of living things makes him seem like a molecular geneticist avant la lettre.”"

 

"And as far as that pernicious teleology of which Aristotle stands accused, Leroi asserts that it provides the very justification for proclaiming Aristotle the inventor of science."

 

"“He’s a comparative biologist; his real interest is specific teleology."

 

"Aristolte wants to know not only why this animal has that feature, but also why others haven’t."

 

"To answer this question, and the countless others like it, prompted by all the parts of all the animals in all the world, he devised a system of teleological principles and precepts."

 

"It’s the core of a system that has been used ever since.”

"Leroi holds off admitting until late in the book that the charge he had leveled against Plato — that his science seems inseparable from theology — holds for Aristotle, too."

 

"“I have kept Aristotle’s theos in the shadows. It may even be that I have done so deliberately; that I have been reluctant to reveal the degree to which my hero’s scientific system is riddled with religion. Yet it is.”"

 

We admire Leroi for striving to naturalize Aristotle’s system in the light of modern biology.

 

"Aristotle has gotten a raw deal in the official scientific story."

 

 "But Aristotle can’t be entirely naturalized."

 

"Just don’t trust anything he says about Plato."

 

"There is a diversity of talents and passions that contribute to the advance of science, and it isn’t necessary, in doing justice to some subset of these, to denigrate the others."

THE LAGOON
How Aristotle Invented Science
By Armand Marie Leroi